Aviva Studios, home of Factory International — Attraction in Manchester

Unfortunately I really cannot say I liked this venue or appreciated the fabricated vibe...

On top of that there seem a lot of artificial false positive reviews that don't make sense.

This weird place reminds me of a kind of social housing project from Elephant & Castle.

The shows are pretty amateurish and badly prepared at best. Good on them for encouraging "community" stuff but I don't feel like it's my community.

Shows I've been to have been very poor: Immersive Kagami concert: 2 out of 10 (The technology for the show was not fit for purpose and definitely not fit for a payable show) Yayoi balloon show: 3 out of 20 (Balloons pumped up in rooms?! Does that really pass as a payble show?) Free your mind: part 1 of FYM: 9 out of 10 it was good for sure and the theatre is really nice! 👍 & part 2 of FYM: 2 out of 10. You don't make people stand for 1 hour to watch a show. That's really poor and more of a shortcoming of the venue where they want to cram people in to make money but then force people to stand infront of each other for an hour.

Then let's talk about that awful awful Bar service (with a very limited seating area) where you queue to be ignored and then get an automated machine prompt where you are asked to pay a tip!!! That is really poor and encourages the servers to only serve those who tip! There's no way I'm tipping for someone serving me a beer at the bar after I've waited and seen people jumping Infront of me and getting served for a truly pathetic etiquette!! There's also an area that says "queue here" so you queue for 10 minutes only to be told they can't serve beer there. Well fine but organise yourselves and have a sign saying (queue for coffee!)

Anyway regarding the tipping scam, let this be the best tip (or review) this place and it's business model is cruising for. Especially for an insurance company named venue: after they have arbitrarily doubled everyone's car insurance in a cost of living crisis.

This place is not for middle-aged earning folk: the idea of standing and not even having a seated option, being prompted to tip at the bar for a beer, the awkward mixed toilets, half baked shows masquerading as art, along with the lefty socialist communalism in a brutal concrete warehouse, resonates of a distasteful dystopian, enforced vibe that, all along is meant to milk the audience out of our...

The architect needs sacking.

This might work well for exhibitions but as a gig venue is is seriously lacking and whoever designed it has obviously never been to a gig before in their life.

I went to Fontaines DC last night and I was a little frustrated with the place.

You start with the HUGE queue to get in and then when you eventually get to the entrance you can immediately see the problem. It’s been designed to allow a small flow of exhibition visitors in but in no way is it wide enough to let 5,000 music fans thru the doors pre-gig.

The downstairs foyer looks good. A few concrete benches around the place wouldn’t go amiss as would a bigger bar. The pizza slices are brilliant and the toilets - men, women and GN are fine.

Then you begin the long walk up two flights of stairs (which aren’t wide enough) to the gig hall. Escalators anyone?

The hall itself is pretty good. It’s wide and not too long so you’re not too far from the band even at the back where there are disabled seating options which is brilliant. The queues at the bars are pretty short. The Fontaines had a lot of sound system problems and cut the gig short. Don’t know if the issues were with their own system or with the venue’s system. There are no toilets on this floor though which means a trip down those stairs to the ground floor. I would imagine that if a gig had an interval, those stairs would be very packed.

At the end it was both chaotic and dangerous. They’d closed the entrance because the band were filming a video in it. 5,000 people exiting down those narrow stairs at the end would be bad enough but this time those 5,000 had to exit thru a long 10’ wide corridor. Although the crowd were very well behaved, if they weren’t it could have been a mini Hillsborough.

What were the management thinking?

So to summarise, it looked like a nice exhibition space but a...

the bar was nice and im definitely not blaming the random members of staff but tonights book signing was so badly planned i was actually shaking with anxiety. when the event finished we went to join the queue for the signing and was told to basically join the queue where the books were being sold - there wasn't a "queue" just hundreds of confused people stood around trying to find some kind of queue. after 10 mins someone tried to tell all of us (hundreds of people stood with books in hand) to leave entirely and start queueing outside. by then obviously no one wants to now completely lose any sense of being "toward the front" they had and it's basically punishment for anyone who picked up or bought their book earlier, because anyone who stayed and bought a book could stay in the queue (hard to explain, but EVERYONE there had bought a book, so if you already bought it and then tried to join a signing queue you had to wait a long time, but if you timed it right and bought your book around 10 mins after the event, you could jump to the front of the signing queue). when we were at the front with the books we bought 10 mins ago in our hands ready to go, they told us to wait while they kept letting more and more people from the book buying area go in front of us. no idea why, since (again) we had ALL bought a book... it was crazy overall and nearly gave me a panic attack tbh. i was moderately lucky and only waited 30 mins but i was probably in the first 50 people and i'd guess there were 400 people behind me, so, you do the math. i imagine lots of people had to wait until at least 10/11pm or maybe even gave up entirely and went home, which is sad as the signing is a huge part...